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Alberta

Danielle Smith slams Trudeau’s carbon tax exemption for Atlantic Canada and not rest of country

Published

6 months ago

7 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

‘As a Canadian, do you feel it is fair to continue paying the carbon tax on home heating when some places are now exempt?’ the Alberta premier asked.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith chided Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as being unfair in not applying “tax fairness” for Albertans and all Canadians after Trudeau announced a pause on the carbon tax for home heating oil but only for Atlantic Canada.

“If you’re going to have a federal government asserting that they have to have this power so that everybody is treated equally, then they don’t treat everyone equally. It seems to me that that’s something that should go back to the court and ask them whether or not they want to reconsider whether this is an appropriate use of the federal powers,” Smith said recently at a press conference.

“I would rather the federal government accept that if this is a painful tax coming into winter for Atlantic Canadians, it’s a painful tax going into the winter for everyone and just make sure that he does the right thing and takes the tax off for all types of home heating and every province,” Smith said.

 

Smith has been fighting a prolonged battle with the Liberal federal government of Trudeau, who has gone on the attack against Alberta’s oil and gas industry through the implementation of ideologically charged laws, including the punitive carbon tax.

Trudeau, however, has given breaks to some parts of the country on the carbon tax for home heating fuels but not others.

He recently announced that he was pausing the collection of the carbon tax on home heating oil in for three years, but only for Atlantic Canadian provinces. The current cost of the carbon tax on home heating fuel is 17 cents per litre. Most Canadians, however, heat their homes with clean-burning natural gas, a fuel that will not be exempted from the carbon tax.

Trudeau’s announcement came amid dismal polling numbers showing his government will be defeated in a landslide by the Conservative Party come the next election.

Recent political challenges against the carbon tax have failed. Recently, a CPC motion calling for the carbon tax to be paused for all Canadians failed to pass after the Liberal and Bloc Quebecois MPs voted against it. This motion interestingly had support from the New Democratic Party (NDP) but that was not enough to get it passed.

Canadian premiers come together to demand carbon tax pause for all provinces

Trudeau’s latest offering of a three-year pause on the carbon tax in Atlantic Canada has caused a major rift with oil and gas-rich western provinces, notably Alberta and Saskatchewan, and even Manitoba, which has a new NDP government.

This prompted all premiers of Canada to come together to call on the Trudeau government to extend the carbon tax fuel pause to all Canadians.

“All this is doing is causing unfairness, making life less affordable, and really harming the most vulnerable as we get into the winter season,” Smith said today about most provinces being left out of the carbon tax pause.

Going one step further, on November 10, Five Canadian premiers from coast to coast banded together to demand Trudeau drop the carbon tax for home heating for all Canadian provinces, saying his policy of giving one region a tax break over another have caused “divisions” in Canada.

After Trudeau announced a special tax break for Atlantic Canada, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe said his province will stop collecting a federal carbon tax on natural gas used to heat homes on January 1, 2024, unless it gets a similar tax break as the Atlantic Canadian provinces.

Alberta has repeatedly promised to place the interests of their people above the Trudeau government’s “unconstitutional” demands while consistently reminding the federal government that their infrastructures and economies depend upon oil, gas, and coal.

As for Smith has fought back, and recently tore a page off a heckler’s fantasy suggestion of a solar and wind battery-powered future after she stepped into the lion’s den to advocate for oil and gas at a conference hosted by a pro-climate change think tank.

Smith has said she will be looking into whether a Supreme Court challenge on the carbon tax is in order. She noted, however, that as Alberta has a deregulated energy industry, unlike Saskatchewan, she is not able to stop collecting the federal carbon tax.

The Trudeau government’s current environmental goals – in lockstep with the United Nations’ “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” – include phasing out coal-fired power plants, reducing fertilizer usage, and curbing natural gas use over the coming decades.

The reduction and eventual elimination of the use of so-called “fossil fuels” and a transition to unreliable “green” energy has also been pushed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) – the globalist group behind the socialist “Great Reset” agenda – an organization in which Trudeau and some of his cabinet are involved.

The Trudeau government has also defied a recent Supreme Court ruling and will push ahead with its net-zero emission regulations.

Canada’s Supreme Court recently ruled that the federal government’s “no more pipelines” legislation is mostly unconstitutional after a long legal battle with the province of Alberta, where the Conservative government opposes the radical climate change agenda.

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Alberta

Alberta government should eliminate corporate welfare to generate benefits for Albertans

Published on May 2, 2024

By

From the Fraser Institute

By Spencer Gudewill and Tegan Hill

Last November, Premier Danielle Smith announced that her government will give up to $1.8 billion in subsidies to Dow Chemicals, which plans to expand a petrochemical project northeast of Edmonton. In other words, $1.8 billion in corporate welfare.

And this is just one example of corporate welfare paid for by Albertans.

According to a recent study published by the Fraser Institute, from 2007 to 2021, the latest year of available data, the Alberta government spent $31.0 billion (inflation-adjusted) on subsidies (a.k.a. corporate welfare) to select firms and businesses, purportedly to help Albertans. And this number excludes other forms of government handouts such as loan guarantees, direct investment and regulatory or tax privileges for particular firms and industries. So the total cost of corporate welfare in Alberta is likely much higher.

Why should Albertans care?

First off, there’s little evidence that corporate welfare generates widespread economic growth or jobs. In fact, evidence suggests the contrary—that subsidies result in a net loss to the economy by shifting resources to less productive sectors or locations (what economists call the “substitution effect”) and/or by keeping businesses alive that are otherwise economically unviable (i.e. “zombie companies”). This misallocation of resources leads to a less efficient, less productive and less prosperous Alberta.
And there are other costs to corporate welfare.

For example, between 2007 and 2019 (the latest year of pre-COVID data), every year on average the Alberta government spent 35 cents (out of every dollar of business income tax revenue it collected) on corporate welfare. Given that workers bear the burden of more than half of any business income tax indirectly through lower wages, if the government reduced business income taxes rather than spend money on corporate welfare, workers could benefit.

Moreover, Premier Smith failed in last month’s provincial budget to provide promised personal income tax relief and create a lower tax bracket for incomes below $60,000 to provide $760 in annual savings for Albertans (on average). But in 2019, after adjusting for inflation, the Alberta government spent $2.4 billion on corporate welfare—equivalent to $1,034 per tax filer. Clearly, instead of subsidizing select businesses, the Smith government could have kept its promise to lower personal income taxes.

Finally, there’s the Heritage Fund, which the Alberta government created almost 50 years ago to save a share of the province’s resource wealth for the future.

In her 2024 budget, Premier Smith earmarked $2.0 billion for the Heritage Fund this fiscal year—almost the exact amount spent on corporate welfare each year (on average) between 2007 and 2019. Put another way, the Alberta government could save twice as much in the Heritage Fund in 2024/25 if it ended corporate welfare, which would help Premier Smith keep her promise to build up the Heritage Fund to between $250 billion and $400 billion by 2050.

By eliminating corporate welfare, the Smith government can create fiscal room to reduce personal and business income taxes, or save more in the Heritage Fund. Any of these options will benefit Albertans far more than wasteful billion-dollar subsidies to favoured firms.

Authors:

Spencer Gudewill
Policy Analyst, Fraser Institute
and
Tegan Hill
Associate Director, Alberta Policy, Fraser Institute
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Alberta

Official statement from Premier Danielle Smith and Energy Minister Brian Jean on the start-up of the Trans Mountain Pipeline

Published on May 1, 2024

By

Alberta is celebrating an important achievement for the energy industry – the start-up of the twinned Trans Mountain pipeline. It’s great news Albertans and Canadians as this will welcome a new era of prosperity and economic growth. The completion of TMX is monumental for Alberta, since this will significantly increase our province’s output. It will triple the capacity of the original pipeline to now carry 890,000 barrels per day of crude oil from Alberta’s oil sands to British Columbia’s Pacific Coast.
We are excited that Canada’s biggest and newest oil pipeline in more than a decade, can now bring oil from Edmonton to tide water in B.C. This will allow us to get our energy resources to Pacific markets, including Washington State and California, and Asian markets like Japan, South Korea, China, and India. Alberta now has new energy customers and tankers with Alberta oil will be unloading in China and India in the next few months.
For Alberta this is a game-changer, the world needs more reliably and sustainably sourced Alberta energy, not less. World demand for oil and gas resources will continue in the decades ahead and the new pipeline expansion will give us the opportunity to meet global energy demands and increase North American and global energy security and help remove the issues of energy poverty in other parts of the world.
Analysts are predicting the price differential on Canadian crude oil will narrow resulting in many millions of extra government revenues, which will help fund important programs like health, education, and social services – the things Albertans rely on. TMX will also result in billions of dollars of economic prosperity for Albertans, Indigenous communities and Canadians and create well-paying jobs throughout Canada.
Our province wants to congratulate the Trans Mountain Corporation for its tenacity to have completed this long awaited and much needed energy infrastructure, and to thank the more than 30,000 dedicated, skilled workers whose efforts made this extraordinary project a reality. The province also wants to thank the Federal Government for seeing this project through. This is a great example of an area where the provincial and federal government can cooperate and work together for the benefit of Albertans and all Canadians.
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